Identity is never singular but is multiply constructed across intersecting and antagonistic discourses, practices and positions.
Identity is becoming more dependent on what people are willing subscribe to and less dependent on objective criteria such as skin colour or where they're born. Ways of identifying blackness are no longer black or white. It's not a case of us or them, you can now be us and them; like them but different.
Popular culture is one of the sites where this struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged: it is also the stake to be won or lost in that struggle. It is the arena of consent and resistance.
I'm the blackest member of my family. You know, these mixed families produce children of all colors, and in Jamaica, the question of exactly what shade you were, in colonial Jamaica, that was the most important question. Because you could read off class and education and status from that. I was aware and conscious of that from the very beginning.
There's no permanent, fixed class consciousness. You can't work out immediately what people think and what politics they have simply by looking at their socio-economic position.
The nature of power in the modern world is that it is also constructed in relation to political, moral, intellectual, cultural, ideological, sexual questions.
What I realized the moment I got to Oxford was that someone like me could not really be part of it. I mean, I could make a success there, I could even be perhaps accepted into it, but I would never feel it was my place. It's the summit of something else. It's distilled Englishness.
My family belonged to a very particular formation - middle-class and coloured, not black. That meant it had a closer connection to the plantocracy than many other people did. So I didn't feel like an ordinary black Jamaican boy.
The very notion of Great Britain's 'greatness' is bound up with empire. Euro-scepticism and Little Englander nationalism could hardly survive if people understood whose sugar flowed through English blood and rotted English teeth.
The NHS is one of the most humanitarian acts that has ever been undertaken in peace time.
Thatcherism, as an ideology, addresses the fears, the anxieties, the lost identities, of a people. It invites us to think about politics in images. It is addressed to our collective fantasies, to Britain as an imagined community, to the social imaginary.
A lot of crap goes on in media studies, like in almost everything.
Britain is not homogenous; it was never a society without conflict. The English fought tooth and nail over everything we know of as English political virtues - rule of law, free speech, the franchise.
The DuBois Institute in the heart of Harvard is an extremely important political intervention and I'm delighted to be invited to speak here.
Politicians always think they know what people feel. It's a fallacy, because there is no such thing as 'the people.' It is a discursive device for summoning the people that you want. You're constructing the people, you're not reflecting the people.